Area Studies: China and Southeast Asia

Manuscript Records of Traders, Travellers and Missionaries and Diplomats, 1792-1942

This collection consists of the diaries, journals, letters, photographs and scrapbooks of a host of American and British businessmen, tourists, missionaries, journalists and diplomats from the first British mission to China to the thawing of East-West relations in the 1970s and 1980s. Included are the papers of John Backhouse, chief clerk at the British consulate in Hong Kong in the 1840s and 1850s, J A Thomas (1862-1940), American tobacco entrepreneur and Sinologist, and G E Morrison (1862-1920), Australian journalist in China. 

From the School of Oriental and African Studies, London

The China Inland Mission (CIM) was founded in Brighton in 1865 by James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) to evangelise China’s inland provinces. It sent its first missionaries to China in 1866 and was given major impetus by the famous ‘Lammermuir’ mission, headed by Taylor, which is often seen as a turning point in the history of missions to China.

This collection consists of J H Taylor’s correspondence, journals and other collected files, personal papers of other CIM missionaries, the organisational records of the CIM, the records of the Chefoo Schools Association, and CIM publications.

The Opium Trade and the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, 1945-1948

This collection brings together the UK Foreign Office files relating to the opium trade and the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs from the period 1945 to 1948. Included are documents as varied as surveys estimating world requirements of dangerous drugs, directives for the control of opium, texts of the various narcotics protocols, United Nations questionnaires and reports on methods of determining the origin of opium by chemical or physical means.

Economic Development in Brunei, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, 1950-1980

This collection presents UK Government documents from the National Archives, Kew relating to the economic stresses of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan as rapidly emerging and newly industrialised economies by the late 1970s. It also covers economic developments in Malaysia following the granting of independence and the advances of the oil industry in Brunei.